Understanding your audience – how to build a digital strategy

As the divide between digital natives and digital immigrants continues to grow, it’s important to realize there are still countless businesses who have yet to truly understand and/or embrace the value in building a digital strategy and not just a website. It’s understandable, but still unacceptable. For the most part, helping clients understand how marketing efforts went astray or web development failed is simply a matter of education.

People trust people before any form of media. It’s a fact. From asking a friend what they thought of a movie to consulting with family about finance, the spectrum of “internal” person to person trust is enormous in comparison to placing credibility in the bombardment of advertisements people encounter on a daily basis. Essentially, as a tech-savvy society, we’ve become numb to advertising and wise to what the masses at large are saying.

General numbness to conventional advertising/marketing is a cornerstone when it comes to crafting a digital strategy for your brand. The concept of “just needing a website” is a misnomer. Building a presence on the internet is becoming largely about endorsement from trusted and respected communities. Think positive customer testimonial on a much larger scale. For example, if your company sells chemistry equipment and you’ve got an endorsement from the National Institutes of Health talking about how great your products are, people interested in buying your products would likely trust that NIH wouldn’t just hand out endorsements to anyone right? That makes you credible, and more importantly, casts a positive light on your company. Those effects would be long lasting and would help build your comprehensive credibility as a brand.

Imagine being able to create similar credibility by earning endorsements naturally as a consequence of your honesty, integrity, and commitment to quality. That’d be a perfect world right? Well, you’re in luck. It’s a reality, and it all starts by taking the initiative to understand how you want your brand to be perceived online.

Here’s a few pointers on the best practices for laying the frame work of a digital strategy for your business:

1.) Who are you and what are you doing with that computer?

Understand the scope of your business. You should be able to define what your company does, why you do it so well, and what you have to offer that your competitors don’t. You should also take the time to evaluate your current marketing strategy. Is it working? Is your business growing every year? Do you keep encountering the same problems every quarter, month, or week? What’s holding you back from exapanding? What’s your number one asset and how is it helping you? All questions to consider before diving into the internet in search of answers as to why your business is struggling or how to make your business stronger.

2.) What are the greatest challenges you’ve encountered as a business owner or employee?

Learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of your competitors. If you could pick three instances where you could’ve made a decision to improve a business but your superiors wouldn’t listen or implement your ideas, what would they be? What were those ideas? What motivated you to find solutions your business leaders weren’t providing? Did you notice anything the competition was doing better than your company? Time to get in touch with those critical thinking instincts.